Tag Archives: Bat Briefs

Handsome, Clean-Cut, and Groovy

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“Handsome, clean-cut, and groovy” is how the nefarious villainness Nefertiti (Ziva Rodann) describes Batman when she sees him (significantly) on the television. This sparks the ire of the evil King Tut — but if he’d only watched previous bat-episodes, you’d think he’d be resigned. The henchwomen are always falling for Batman’s brand of paunchy, be-tighted goodness and/or grooviness; there’s just something about a cape that makes the bat-fans swoon.

Batman isn’t only an object of desire on the 60s television show; he’s actually the only object of desire. The show includes gratuitously scantily clad lovelies, especially in the first King Tut episode, with its gleeful harem tropes and Nefertiti herself chewing anachronistically but enthusiastically on a phallic hot dog.
 
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But the lovelies are never identified within the dialogue as objects of erotic interest; Batman and Robin are impervious to their charms, and (in Nefertiti’s case) appear to forget about her altogether after she’s tragically driven insane by pebble torture and engages in a beguiling bat dance. The only clue that anyone notices she’s hot is the voice over of the second episode, which refers to her as a “dish”. This is the case with virtually all the other leading ladies as well; Julie Newmar as Catwoman wears a skin-tight, jaw-dropping outfit, but no one’s jaw drops; the Moth, one of Riddler’s associates, wears a skin-tight, eye-raising outfit, but no one’s eyes are raised. The only sex object which is acknowledged as a sex object is the Batman himself. In this show, it’s women, not men, who visibly lust.

Batman is often described as “camp.” Camp can mean various things, but it’s often connected to queerness, gay themes, or the closet. In this case, the show is certainly reversing, or inverting, the expected economy of desire. You could say that the female concupiscence directed at Batman is a humorous stand-in for the male gaze that viewers are encouraged to cast at Nefertiti and her sisters. But you could just as easily say that the male gaze is the concealed deception which hides the obvious truth — which is that the show presents Adam West, for both male and female viewers, as the central erotic point of interest, from Bat bulge to Orientalized sensuous Bat dance. Superheroes are sexy, Adam West tells you; groove on it, Bat fans, surreptitiously or otherwise.
 

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The Cruellest Batman of Them All

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My family is happily watching our way through the newly released Batman TV 60s TV show DVDs; I think we’re up to 14 out of 120 episodes now.

For the most part the Batman TV show is remembered as goofy fun — and goofy fun it is. But the first two episodes (with Frank Gorshin’s Riddler as the villain) are unexpectedly…not dark exactly, and not grim, but cruel in a way that’s all the more shocking for being casually off-hand.

A couple of times in the show, Bruce Wayne, with little prompting, segues into a discussion of his murdered parents. It’s presented as pro-forma and, with Adam West’s tongue-in-cheek delivery, as fairly ridiculous. The show essentially sneers at murder and childhood trauma; they’re presented as ridiculous.

Even more egregious is the fate of the Riddler’s girlfriend, Molly (Jill St. John). Molly dresses up as Robin (insert disquisition on camp here) and tricks Batman into letting her into the Batcave. She then runs up to the atomic pile that powers the cave. Batman begs her to come down, but she mutters vaguely about being scared, and, overacting all the while, spins, staggers, and falls into the reactor even though Batman is standing like a foot away from her holding out his hand. Batman mutters something regretful about how he wishes he could have saved her (“Poor deluded child!”), and the show barrels on cheerfully. Molly’s death, like the Wayne’s, is viewed as a joke. Batman’s traumatic backstory and the tragic death of the villainness are both portrayed as glib narrative heart tuggers — cynical melodramatic boilerplate.
 

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The rest of the shows I’ve seen so far don’t engage in this kind of sneering; it seems like an early tonal blip. It’s interesting just how jarring that blip is, though. Grim and gritty in genre is usually seen as brutal, or tough — blood on the Batglove is a sign of unflinching viciousness, as is shooting Batgirl in the stomach. But I think in a lot of ways the Adam West Batman is actually meaner than Frank Miller or Alan Moore. Those guys took violence seriously, they treated bloodshed with reverence, at least in the sense that bloodshed was important to them and meaningful in their writing. But for the 60s Batman, violent, hideous death is just a punch line. Or maybe after all the 60s Batman just shows that violence in Batman is never anything but a punch line; in its cynicism, it reveals the callow cynicism of all that grim and gritty violence that. How many times can you shoot Bruce Wayne’s parents before you start to feel like Bat-trauma is just another disposable Bat-product?